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<text>
<title>
(1970s) Living with the `Peculiar Institution'
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
February 14, 1977
Living with the `Peculiar Institution'
</hdr>
<body>
<p> In his novel Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy imagines the
Lord leading white people to North America and bestowing that
Eden on them with only one strange injunction: There are some
people in a place called Africa. Be careful that you don't
enslave them. Otherwise...But one day in 1619, a Dutch
frigate landed at Jamestown, Va., and traded twenty black
Africans for food and supplies. That was the beginning.
</p>
<p> If slavery was America's original sin, Roots, for all its
soap opera, sex and violence, seems to have had a certain
expiatory effect. From the various mythic provinces of TV, which
may be the densest core of American imagination now, are
gathered a virtuous and likable group of heroes: Pa Cartwright
from the Ponderosa, Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
affable Sergeant Enright from MacMillian and Wife, and sweet
Sandy Duncan from the apartment upstairs. But in Roots, they all
turn counterfeit--treacherous, violent and contemptible. Only
one white, Old George, is sympathetic. The blacks are noble and
enduring, even forbearing when given a chance for revenge (Tom's
opportunity to whip one of his white bosses). However
unintentional, an apology from white America is contained
subliminally in all of this--the blockbuster week-long
programming, the parade of villainous white stars. It is a kind
of ritual sacrifice of pop heroes, a small but formal self-
abasement.
</p>
<p> But how accurate is television's Roots as history? Novelist
William Styron (The Confessions of Nat Turner) is harsher than
most critics. Roots, he says, "is dishonest tripe. It took a
crude mass-culture approach. It shows how dismally ignorant
blacks and whites are still about slavery." As a number of
critics have noted, there were, to start with, some errors of
setting. Styron objects that "counties in Virginia, North
Carolina and Tennessee which are as flat as Ping Pong paddles
look as if they were shot on a back set used for horse operas
with a background of the San Bernardino Mountains."
</p>
<p> Another reviewer pointed out that two white men would hardly
have dared to venture near Kunta Kinte's village to capture him
because at that time a war was brewing between the English and
a local chief, who would probably have slaughtered any whites
he found in the area.
</p>
<p> Alex Haley and the TV producers had the Lorne Greene
character farming cotton in Spotsylvania County, Va., it should
have been tobacco. Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual, observes: "When you see Leslie Uggams and
her long, polished nails, you just have to laugh." Although
Cruse liked Roots, he thought "the ending was contrived,
commercialized and romanticized. For one thing, under those
conditions, you don't just tie up a plantation owner to a tree
and then get into a wagon and casually drive away as if there
weren't bloodhounds and night riders who would track you down."
</p>
<p> There are more substantive complaints. Historian James
Brewer Stewart says, "The master/slave relationship was ridden
with ambiguity. Plantation overseers and owners were not all-
powerful. They were tied by a system of reciprocal rights and
obligations." Roots often has a flattened, cartoon quality; the
whites nearly all villainous, the blacks uniformly heroic.
Africa is romanticized to the point where it becomes a
combination of 3rd century Athens and Club Mediterranee, with
peripatetic philosophers afoot and Claude Levi-Strauss expected
for dinner.
</p>
<p> Yet as a psychological event, if not as history, Roots
surely transcends its mistakes. Haley called his saga "faction,"
and therefore it cannot be evaluated merely as history or merely
as an entertainment. As either one of those, it fails. Yet as
both, in resonance with the long, complex American experience
of the subject, Roots is extremely powerful.
</p>
<p> The distinction between cathartic melodrama and historical
events needs attention, however, if only because professional
historians themselves have so much trouble respecting it.
Slavery, so obvious in its lurid immortality, is apt to become
especially distorted in the hands of American historians. "What
is it about the black experience," asks Author Michael Novak,
"that produces in so many good minds, black and white, a
positive lust for corruptions of elementary sense?" The answers
are probably 1) guilt, and 2) ideology.
</p>
<p> It is useful, though not extenuating, to point out that
Americans did not invent slavery. Their form of chattel slavery,
however, was uniquely ugly. Still, slavery has a long,
dishonorable history. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia kept slaves
before 2000 B.C., and the Code of Hammurabi laid down rules
governing the practice. In eight years, Caesar sent back some
500,000 slaves from Gaul to work mines, plantations and public
projects, some of course, became gladiators. The Domesday Book
recorded 25,000 slaves in England. Races from the Mayans to the
Muslims to, notably, black Africans have kept slaves for many
centuries, in varying degrees of misery and servitude. The
Malays sometimes paid their debts by giving say, a child into
slavery.
</p>
<p> There are even some perversely approving things to be said
for slavery, that in its earliest form, it actually marked a
humanitarian improvement in the laws of war, since it involved
the capture of prisoners instead of their slaughter. Oddly, it
was not a primitive practice, in one sense, because it required
a stable and settled society in order to take root.
</p>
<p> Only by the nimblest sophistry could slavery be
countenanced in a "civilized" society like 18th and 19th century
America. Slavery has tortured American historians for
generations; slavery theses and revisions of them have writhed
through the stream of historiography for 150 years or longer.
</p>
<p> Writers like Frederick Law Olmstead, a Northerner who
traveled through the South in the 1850s and wrote three books
about Southern life, emphasized the lurid, brutal and simply
inefficient aspects of slavery in order to promote the
abolitionist cause. This was a Simon Legree approach to the
subject--and there are aspects of such simplism in Roots.
</p>
<p> The trends that followed:
</p>
<p>--The Magnolias-and-Banjos School. This interpretation,
promoted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was
elaborated by the Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips. The
premise, which influenced historians well into this century,
had it that blacks were innately lazy and incompetent, capable
of working only under compulsion. In this view, blacks were
childlike innocents, perhaps biologically inferior; slavery,
whatever its excesses, was a generally benign means of giving
the colored people civilized ways. Gone With the WInd carried
that general message.
</p>
<p>-- Blacks as Devastated Victims. This view predominated from
the late '40s through the Kennedy Administration. Historian
Stanley Elkins, building on black Sociologist E. Franklin
Frazier's work in the 1930s, detailed in Slavery (1959), a view
that whites had done to blacks what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Blacks were--and are--acted upon; they do not themselves
act, because their culture was broken by slavery and its racist
aftermath. The view awakened liberal guilt and paralleled the
rise of the white civil rights movement. The Moynihan report
described the devastation of black family life and asked
Government aid to try to invigorate it again.
</p>
<p>-- Blacks as Strong, Proud, Culturally Cohesive. The trend
began with the Lyndon Johnson years and the rise of militant
blacks who scorned the devastated-victim theory as unworthy and
abject. The Moynihan report was rejected, if not disproved.
Historian Herbert Gutman began work on the view of the black
family as shrewd, strong, not nearly as weakened as it had
seemed. The extended family had resources unsuspected by whites.
</p>
<p> Yet if blacks had not indeed been broken by slavery, why
did they put up with it? (One answer is that they did not, but
responded with thousands of acts of sabotage, from nuisance to
insurrection.)
</p>
<p> There is a withering crossfire of pedantries in nearly all
academic discussions of slavery and American blacks. Two years
ago, in a book called Time on the Cross, Economist-Historians
Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman accumulated a mass of data on
antebellum life in the South. They fed their statistics into
computers and came up with an astonishing portrait of slavery
as a highly rational and efficient system that gave the South
considerable economic growth and a high standard of living for
all Southerners, both black and white. While admitting the
immorality of slavery, Fogel and Engerman found that blacks in
the South, propelled by self-interest and the world ethic,
outfitted with a Victorian code of middle-class behavior learned
from their masters, did remarkedly well under the "peculiar
institution."
</p>
<p> The Fogel and Engerman thesis, rather weirdly cheerful,
seemed a relapse back to something like the banjo school. It
brought a fusillade of rebuttal, most of it convincing. Fogel
and Engerman argued that blacks were willing collaborators in
an unfair but workable capitalist system; owners got free labor,
blacks got economic rewards and family stability if they played
along. This was one attempt to explain how blacks could be
strong and cohesive and yet still be slaves.
</p>
<p> Gutman, in one of his counter-arguments, came up with this
formula: family stability of black slaves--now widely
accepted, despite the breakup of many families by sale--was
a strong anti-insurrectionalist force. Roots seems to agree with
this explanation. When Kunta Kinte plans to run away for a
second time, despite his partially amputated foot and love for
Bell, she tells him that her first husband was killed for
running away and her children sold off, and now she is pregnant
again. If slaves revolt or run away, the family is broken or
killed. So Kunta stays. Thus Haley squares with the current
theory.
</p>
<p> One of the great problems of all this history is thesis
mongering, the intertwining of ideology and fashion with
academic evidence. The black experience in the U.S., from
slavery onward, has been rich, immensely varied, extremely
complicated and often difficult to lay hold of. Blacks in
slavery were kept illiterate, and so left almost exclusively
their oral tradition--which, of course, is what Roots is.
</p>
<p> During the '30s, as part of the Federal Writers Project of
the New Deal, scores of very elderly blacks who had lived under
slavery were interviewed all across the South. Selections of the
interviews, collected in Life Under the "Peculiar Institution,"
prove that generalizations about slavery are nearly impossible.
Some slaves were well fed and happy. Some were beaten to death.
Some slave women were raped and others treated with kindness.
A slave named Frank Bell in New Orleans was often kept in
chains; his master discovered that Bell had married and, in a
drunken rage, cut off the girl's head.
</p>
<p> A former slave named Andrew Boone described how runaways
were beaten; first with a "cobbin" paddle with 40 holes in it
to raise blisters, then with a cat-o'-nine-tails. "When de
whippin' wit de paddle was over, dey took de cat-o'-nine-tails
and busted the blisters. By dis time de blood sometimes would
be runnin' down deir heels. Den de next thing was a wash in salt
water strong enough to hold up an egg." Then an ex-slave named
Lindsey Faucette reported: "Marse never allowed us to be whipped...We worked in de day and had de nights to play games and
have singin's.
</p>
<p> In a sense, it does not matter whether what Haley has to
say in Roots is literally true--and much of it undoubtedly is.
What matters is that, despite a certain mythic stereotyping,
Roots is plausible. The only pertinent generalization about
slavery may be that it was an immense evil. Roots gives that
evil a brutal immediacy. In that process, the years of bondage
have assumed a new psychological pertinence for both blacks and
whites. Oddly, many whites seem to feel not guilt but an
unexpected shock of identification with blacks, while blacks
experience a larger shock of pride at glimpsing a complete
vision of where they have been and what they have overcome.
Neither race has ever seen it quite that way before.
</p>
<p>-- Lance Morrow
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>